Things Hidden
by Lafayette1777
Summary: It's time to return to the identity he once knew, and the identity he must learn to remember again. Sixteen years after leaving home, Malcolm comes back to the family, only to find that they're not quite ready to come back to him.
1. The Dark

**Author's Note: This is the first chapter of a multi-chapter crossover between Malcolm in the Middle and Cody Banks. It centers mostly around the Malcolm universe, but adding in elements of Cody Banks. All will be explained in coming chapters, I hope. Reviews much appreciated!**

This is the worst part. Even he can't lie to himself about that.

Her eyes are beginning to water. She leans her head up to sniffle, and he can see the overhead light glint off her now wet mascara. It's the middle of the fucking night and she's forgotten to take off her make-up before bed. Her hair's still perfectly styled, floating over bathrobe wrapped shoulders.

"Lucien, I..." she trails off.

"My name's not Lucien," he states, matter-of-factly. "It's Cody."

No mind that that's a lie also. It might as well be true, in this expensive flat in this strange city that's about to get a whole lot more exciting the moment he steps out that door.

Tears begin to drip down her face. She can't seem to find words, so he steps forward and puts his hands on her shoulders. "Look, Marie, I'm sorry that what we had wasn't real. This wasn't my decision. That's more here than you know, more than you'd ever want to know. I have to go now. You'll be safe, but I won't see you again. I'm sorry it had to happen this way, because it wasn't fair to you. But it's for the greater good, I promise."

One blonde hair sticks to her face with moisture. She's pretty, but he doesn't feel anything toward her. This relationship was predetermined, and not by any omnipotent being. He's so detached at this point he has to force himself to be guilty, and only when he's ready. Now is not the time to feel bad about this. Now is the time to say the little speech he has perfected and get the hell out. Other lives depend on him. Her broken heart will heal.

"You're going?" she finally chokes out.

He nods. "I have to. Your information is going to be useful. I'm sorry."

He turns then, grabbing his backpack, and pulling the gun out of the front pocket. After checking that it's loaded and ready to go, he shoves it in the underarm holster concealed by his jacket.

There's no trouble on the stairs, and the apartment building's lobby is empty. On the street he takes a right turn and stays to the darkened part of the sidewalk. It doesn't do much, as the ancient city's streets are narrow and lit by yellow light. Lost tourists try to decipher the french signs and a few drunken regulars stumble around the Moulin Rouge, as if they were Toulouse-Lautrec himself. He ignores all of them and keeps walking, head down, very aware of the thump of the gun, colliding gently with his side with each step.

A van turns the corner ahead of him. Unmarked, dark colored. Could be anyone. Could be an exterminator. A family of eight. Could be the CIA, arriving to pick him up. Could be the opposition, ready to chop his limbs off one by one and then shoot him in the face.

He changes directions and quickens his pace. The van follows him, pulling up slowly beside him.

"Bonjour," says the driver cheerfully.

Cody lets out a sigh. When he looks up, there's a shotgun aimed at his throat. He doesn't think, just lets his knees crumple under him, pushes himself forward three inches closer to the van, and then stands back up again suddenly. The shotgun goes off as his shoulder smacks into the barrel, leaving his ears ringing but his body unharmed. The driver's too stunned to keep his fingers solid, and Cody yanks the gun from his grasp.

He doesn't wait to see what else they're packing before diving back into the night. He slips into an alleyway, not shortening his pace for a second as he uses a trashcan to boost himself up onto a brick wall, running next to several backstreets. He's short, but just tall enough to spring up onto a rooftop, feet silent against the ancient materials. He leaps from roof to roof, just another shadow in Montmartre.

Only a few minutes lapse before he's being followed again, his pursuer's footsteps just barely audible over his own breathing and the unending din of the city. He throws the shot gun far to his left, hopefully drawing their attention away. He fears the moment when he'll run out of rooftops, or the jump will be too far. He's in a tight spot, but he consoles himself that he's seen worse.

His heart beats with the terrifying thrill of the chase.

Cody pushes himself across another divide, then lets himself fall to his knees, folding his body into a tiny crack where old building meets new building. It's so dark in the crevice he can't see his hands, but he can hear footsteps pause in confusion over his hiding place, and then a whispered conversation he can't make out any words in. Finally, the thuds of heavy shoes drift away, and he loudly lets out his breath.

Three quarters of a second later, hands grip his ankles, and he's yanked roughly from the hidden spot, and back onto the slanting roof. Two unfamiliar, angry faces stare down at him.

"Balls," is all he says. They pull him to his feet, pat him down, and inevitably find most of the various weapons he has stashed on him. If there is one thing his upbringing prepared him for, it's how to hide your valuables.

"They'll be here any second, you know."

His captors don't reply.

"You won't get far with me."

They drag him forward, his feet barely touching the surface, across the textured rooftops. He can see the Eiffel Tower in his peripheral vision. It's glowing blue for some occasion he can't remember. They walk without hurry, toward some destination hidden in darkness in front of them.

He can feel the vibrations before he sees anything.

Cody and his captors pause just long enough so that when he turns his head back he can see the charge, a pack of agents lead by his very own handler. A van is following from below.

Cody looks up at the man on his left. "Told you."

Veronica's face becomes clear when she's thirty feet out, though he knew it was her just from the rhythm of her sprinting gait. She's armed, sites already trained on the man to his right. Cody flexes his bicep experimentally, but he is still tight in their grip.

"Hand him over," Veronica commands. "There's no escape."

They seem to accept that. He can hear the air stir as the two men exchange looks. They turn to face the posse of CIA agents. It's mostly darkness behind them, but he can sense a gap somewhere close, a forgotten space between two buildings. How close, he can't tell.

"Let him go," Veronica says clearly, across the ten yard divide.

"Okay," one of them says. The hands on his arms tighten, pulling him backward and off balance, his face to the stars. For a second, he is in limbo, and then they release him.

He only manages to flail for a moment, and then he's in empty space. _So there's that gap._ The wind fills his ears, and he can hear his name screeched. He falls for an eternity, but they can't be higher than four stories up. Gravity carries him through the night air, until finally the earth meets him.

He crumples on impact with the concrete, and his mind goes blank.


	2. The Awake

It begins with a tingling in his hands, a kind of prickly feeling that isn't comfortable, nor uncomfortable. It spreads up his forearms, to his shoulders, and into his chest, where it spreads throughout his body. After a while, he feels as though he has the strength to open his eyes, as he now realizes they have been closed.

The room is blurry, light colors blending together in meaningless globs. He pushes his eyelids open further, things begin to come into focus. A sunny window on his right. His feet, splayed out before him under white blankets. A terrible pain in his limbs. A woman in the chair next to him, looking a down at a book with her reading glasses dipping down her nose. She doesn't look up until he opens his mouth and chokes out three twisted syllables.

"Veronica?"

She looks up in surprise, eyes drifting around the room, searching for the source of her name. When her gaze falls on his alert face, her eyes grow wide. She's forty-four now, ten years older than him, and has been his handler for almost every operation since he joined the agency a few years after university.

He glances around the room, the fuzzy layer over his brain beginning to recede. He's hooked up to all matter of machines, machines that he can only assume were keeping him alive.

His lips are dry and cracked. "How long?"

"Four weeks," she says, clearly still in shock.

"Thanks for not pulling the plug," he murmurs. "I need morphine, please."

With that, he rolls over, asleep.

m m m

When he wakes again, he can see the calendar on the wall, and he focuses on that for a while, before bothering to look around the room again.

The date marked is the second of May, and he searches his mind for the last day he wasn't lying in this bed. The Montmartre operation...yes. March twenty-eighth. It had been a warm night for the season. In the morning, Parisians would've been greeted with a mere sprinkling of frost.

Slowly, the events of the evening came back to him.

_Shambles._

He pushes it all out of his mind and his eyes are attracted to the whiteboard attached to the wall. He squints to make out the letters, written in green marker. The letters are neat, almost cheerful in handwriting. He imagines a teenage girl scrawling them on the wall in her room, not a seasoned doctor or nurse.

_Emergency contact:_

_Miles_

The family members section is left blank.

Veronica enters a while later, coffee cup and new novel in hand. They meet eyes and he can tell that for a while there, she really thought she'd lost him.

"How're you feeling?"

He checks, and finds the pain in his extremities to have dulled somewhat, but most of them are contained in plaster casings and he doesn't have the strength to move them.

"Okay," he replies. "What did they have to say about all this?"

"What do you mean, 'all of this'?"

"The operation. I fucked it up. I nearly killed myself. Who knows what kind of reverberations that botched night could cause."

"Jesus, Cody, you just spent a month in a coma with half the bones in your body broken. Fucking relax."

He tried to dislodge his angry expression. The heart monitor began to return to a normal-ish rhythm.

"Am I fired?"

"Nope," she sipped her coffee without taking her eyes off him.

"Suspended?"

"Not officially. They don't want you coming into work until you're completely healed though. I know you're going to anyway, but they don't."

"Then what are they gonna do to me?"

"Cody, one screw up doesn't erase twelve years of perfection."

He can't formulate a reply for that.

She smiles in some attempt at comfort, and pats his leg gently. He still winces. "It'll be fine, Cody. Things'll go back to normal after a while."

m m m

Everyone who comes into the room calls him some variation of "Cody" or "Mr. Banks." Years of this says he should be used to it, but it's starting to make him feel weird, makes him squirm just a little in his bed, when he has the energy.

He spends a lot of time sleeping. In the interim, a physical therapist has him do small exercises with the limbs that aren't bound tight and immovable. But he tires easily, and it bothers him to the point of frustration. Around the sleep and the irritation, he reads, as he's always done when he needs to not think about his life for a while.

Two weeks after May 2nd, he's shaken into consciousness by Veronica. His heart is racing, and cold sweat has broken out on the back of his neck.

"You alright?"

He says something very intelligent, along the lines of "Uh?"

"You were having a nightmare, I think."

He can't remember his dream. But he can feel the residual panic, pieces of fear and sadness and a feeling he never thought he'd feel, that he'd forgotten the ache to.

Homesickness.

"Did I say anything?" he asks.

"Mostly nonsense. You might've said 'home' or 'stay away' or something."

He nods solemnly. He knows that the seed's been planted now. The creeping under his skin has been identified.

The next morning, he asks Veronica to bring him his laptop. He drafts an email to the higher-ups, asking for a leave of absence for further recuperation.


	3. The Hurt

**Author's Note: I know I should say how I often I update, but I really have no idea. I've gotta couple of projects going right now and my mind's kind of crowded. All I can promise is that I'll finish it. Eventually. But what I can say with certainty that all reviews are hugely appreciated. They make my day, not even kidding. **

He enters Tallahassee, trying to remember and forget all at once.

The cab driver has a window open, but all it did was stir up the heavy, humid July air that clings to every surface. With each blink, his eyelids stick together uncomfortably. He's familiar with this weather, this sticky feeling. He knows that after a summer spent sprawled outdoors, you barely feel it. As it happens, though, he's lost all conditioning living around Langley, but more often abroad. The four months in Indonesia may have come close to this, but it was too long ago.

"It's here," he tells the driver, who leaves him on the corner, already drenched in sweat. He's beginning to seriously regret this decision.

The only way he knew he'd be able to this address was to search local arrest records, but there hadn't been any in the last five years, so he had to delve into some city records using CIA resources, until he finally found the duplex bungalow. It's typical Florida house, painted a soft green with white embellishments and a metal, rusting porch. Like everything, it seems to be physically weighted down by the amount of water in the air.

He leans down carefully to sling his duffel bag over his shoulder. He faces every movement with caution, every since he started walking around again. They tell him he's still a little fragile, not quite back in alignment, and he feels it with each step. That once complete confidence in his ability is diminished. There's a gun, wrapped up in a beige jacket, inside his shoulder bag.

He gives himself just a moment of preparation before heading up the walk. Any longer and he'll be on the next flight to Washington Reagan.

One breath allowed on the stoop, and he presses the doorbell. Nothing happens, so he assumes it doesn't work and pulls open the screen door to knock instead. Three seconds later, the front door opens wide, and a woman is standing on the threshold.

Her skin is light brown, her hair wavy and darker. The skin around her eyes and mouth is crinkled, presumably from smiling often and large. Her eyes are as dark as her hair, and she's wearing loose jeans and a Rolling Stones shirt.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," she replies. "Eh, who are you?"

"Does Reese Wilkerson live here?"

"Um, yes."

She looks hesitant, so he pulls the trump card. "I'm from the government."

She gets that _Oh, Lord_ expression on her face that seemed to be perfectly frozen on his mother's face for most of his adolescence.

She calls over her shoulder, "Reese! There's a guy here."

"Hold up, I gotta finish seasoning this."

"He's a cop."

There's a murmured swear, and then sounds of movement. A second later, Reese appears. He looks very much the same as he did last time they were together, except with a shorter hair cut and a thinner face. The two men just stare at each other for a few moments, and then Reese reaches forward and grabs him.

He'll admit that he was expecting to get hit, but what Reese does surprises him beyond words. He pulls him into the tightest hug they've ever exchanged, and he reciprocates before his brain has caught up to this new event.

Reese leans back for a moment, looks into his eyes, and says simply, "Malcolm," as if remembering what it feels like to say his name.

Then he punches him so hard in the stomach that it knocks Malcolm straight on his ass.

The brawl lasts a good minute, with the two men rolling around on the sidewalk, smashing each other in the ribs and occasionally getting in a face shot, until the woman breaks it up and drags them both inside.


End file.
